There are many brands and devices, and the popular Roomba vacuum cleaners are no exception, which have testing programs for their products. Businesses can thus have a lot of useful information about the operation of their devices in real environments, and users can test these products before anyone else. In some cases, they may also keep the product and/or receive some compensation, either financial or in kind.

Users must enter into agreements for this purpose when entering these trial programs. These contracts govern all aspects of the assignment, from the information users must provide to what the product can and cannot do during its evaluation. This type of formalism exhaustively defines what can and cannot happen both during and as a result of tests.

However, it doesn’t always work as it should, which can lead to particularly tricky situations, like the one we read about in Technology Review, which states that some Roomba vacuum testers To their surprise, they found intimate pictures of themselves that they didn’t know were posted on social media. Pictures that were probably taken by the Roomba prototypes they were testing.

iRobot, which made Roomba and was bought by Amazon last year, says it had consent to collect this type of data from homes, but participants say otherwise, though they must remain anonymous for now. , because in order to participate in the device testing program, those users had to sign a nondisclosure agreement that prevents them from speaking freely about what happened.

So we will have to wait and see how this matter is resolved, although it is true that the image of the technology company can be quite affected. It is true that these images were taken under very specific conditions, as part of a device testing program, but the fact that the company allowed the images to end up being published on social networks is obviously not good in terms of respect. privacy.

However, it should be clarified that these products were delivered to their testers at the end of 2019, at which time Amazon still had no relationship with iRobot (other than selling its products through the store, of course). But now it may be up to the e-commerce giant to deal with the practices the company carried out before it became its property.